These words are my abode, my only foothold.”Įven grounded by Lahiri’s gorgeous sentences, the experience of reading “Whereabouts” falls short. “ Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. “Is there any place we’re not moving through?” she wonders. She is unsettled, but articulating that feeling helps propel her forward. In an unusual literary and linguistic feat, the author of ÒInterpreter of MaladiesÓ and ÒThe NamesakeÓ wrote her latest novel, ÒWhereabouts,Ó in Italian and translated it to English. The Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri in Princeton, N.J., April 15, 2021. She is ready to make a change in her life, to take a step that might seem small to some but looms large in her limited sphere. Eventually, we learn that the narrator is an only child whose unhappy upbringing has contributed to her current discontent. Although they ultimately assemble themselves into a plot, construction is slow. In brief chapters with locating titles - “In the Bookstore,” “In the Sun,” “At His Place,” etc. Lahiri builds the story in discrete pieces, like a mosaic. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.” “As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. “Solitude: it’s become my trade,” she thinks. Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri See More Collapseīut within her “urban cocoon” (her phrase) she feels isolated.
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